BENGALURU: A constant struggle that Sanjeev Sularia faced as the chief financial officer at Exclusively.in — an ecommerce portal for upscale fashion — was whether their products were priced too high or if they were leaving too much money on the table. Sularia realised that the traditional price optimisation tools were reserved for hardline categories, like electronics and appliances while the softline categories, such as apparel and clothing lines remained highly underserved. He then founded IntelligenceNODE to help decode pricing for online retailers.

Sularia is among those that recognised a pain point in online retail and used technology to solve the problem they encountered. Others in the league include former Myntra COO Ganesh Subramaniam, with his new venture Stylumia that helps predict fashion trends using artificial intelligence, and IQLECT by former Jabong CTO Sachin Sinha, which offers real-time analytics.

Sularia, Subramaniam and Sinha indicate a trend of industry veterans’ attempts to strengthen the technological backbone of online retail through their ventures. “During my time at Myntra and even during previous years spent in the industry, I realised that selection of apparel was largely driven by people’s past experience in the domain and there was no technology being utilised for it,” says Ganesh Subramaniam, founder of Stylumia.

“Also there’s a large gap in the industry in terms of apparels available in the market and user preferences.” Aesthetics for apparels is a very visual preference and it can only be described in visuals and not in terms of attributes, says Ram Prakash H, CTO of Stylumia. For example, if a shirt with stripes in blue colour is well received by consumers, brands tend to assume that blue colour or stripes is what consumers prefer.

However, if you look further within data of the same brand there’s another blue shirt with stripes that hasn’t been doing quite well. “It isn’t about specific attributes. It’s all about the overall visual appeal of the shirt,” says Prakash. This is why Stylumia’s artificial intelligence tool that works on perceptional analysis can give results in the form of precise visuals of apparels that consumers prefer. Stylumia, that counts online marketplaces like Myntra, Voonik and brands like, Jack & Jones, Veromoda and Max, among its customers, is using technology that can help apparel makers take informed decisions using historic and market data.

Former Jabong CTO Sachin Sinha’s brainchild IQLECT works on the principle of real-time analytics, the holy grail that the ecommerce industry swears by. Ironically, getting real-time analytics right is also something most ecommerce marketplaces in India are still struggling with. While at Jabong, Sinha realised that building an analytic engine which works in real-time requires an entirely different set of capabilities and a commitment to technology so deep that it was an effort worth undertaking by a standalone startup.